Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. There’s lots of lore, emotion, and misconceptions of what VC’s do or don’t do for entrepreneurs. In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter.

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Any customer who used the four critical color publishing applications was going to be blown away by how much better the SuperMac boards were. Tell Me How to Find You But having benchmarks in hand that showed us as the winner did us no good unless all our potential customers could see them.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 127

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

He blogs to 10,000 web entrepreneurs at Software by Rob and co-hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us. They are: Fred Wilson: Lead Investors, Dipshit Companies, and Funding Every Entrepreneur. Often board members give entrepreneurs two bits of advice regarding scale: Get a mentor. twenty in your wallet?

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Startup CTO Hire Cofounder Venture Capital 191

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

So, if youre interested in helping avoid mistakes like that, here are the steps: Get a domain name. It doesnt have to be the worlds catchiest name, just pick something reasonably descriptive. If youre concerned about sullying your eventual brand name, dont use your "really good" name, pick a code name.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Little did we know.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Silence.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 210

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

This is a 3-day program for entrepreneurship faculty from around the world how to teach entrepreneurship via the Lean LaunchPad approach ( business model canvas + customer development ) and bring their entrepreneurship curriculums into the 21st century. His name is Alex Lawrence. Serendipity.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

Many of these companies are started by entrepreneurs, and are now household names: Google, Yahoo, eBay and Intel. Luckily for the rest of us, he was able to find his path to a green card, and now employs 24 Americans in West Lafayette, Indiana. Read the rest of The New Startup Arms Race at Huffington Post.

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San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. And the rest is history. Their code name was UTR (Up The River) in reference to their geographic location up the Potomac River.

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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 194

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. It’s been thirty years, but every once an awhile I still wonder what happened to the rest of their lives. Reading this TechCrunch post made me remember the first time I saw someone confront a worldview they didn’t expect.

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 210

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

And the rest is history: Google Maps was a huge success. After all, how would Craig Newmark’s life (and the rest of ours, too) be different today if he had waited to build something with a high-quality design before starting his famous list? And the rest is history: Google Maps was a huge success. Ship it.&# Ship it.&#

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

At Palo Alto Software, I am surrounded by entrepreneurs. Our LivePlan customers are entrepreneurs, our founder and staff have run and sold companies, the Bplans readers are aspiring entrepreneurs (or actual entrepreneurs), and as I sell my own handmade jewelry, I like to think I have a very small claim to the title.

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Curation Lean Software Review Finder 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 18, 2010 Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events The following is a case study of one entrepreneurs transition from a traditional development cycle to continuous deployment. Managing weekly releases got a lot harder once I started doing customer development.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2015

You have to teach entrepreneurs how to fish rather than serving dinner for them. Those were the messages from the two latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on Sirius XM Channel 111. — Teaching entrepreneurs how to fish. And wishing you had asked for help much earlier in a startup. Frank Rimalovski.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Investment Bankers 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

So if youre new, consider not paying any attention to the rest of this post, and just diving into the archives, if you havent already. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. hey eric, love the blog.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

A discounted price is available for early stage entrepreneurs and students. I want to thank Techstars for putting this event together and giving me a chance to experience the scene, even if it lacks a name. Read the rest. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We have two great teaching assistants , plus we’ve rounded up a team of 25 mentors (VC’s and entrepreneurs) to help coach the teams. There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) Why Teach This Class? to optimize this search.

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

If you’re an entrepreneur you might be interested to know that when Sloan took over General Motors in 1923, it was already a $700 million dollar company (about $8.5 Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? The guy who replaced him invented the idea of the modern corporation. Who was he?

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 179

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Even if SJ has some unique "process" that enables him to come up with killer products (I suspect he is just wired differently from most people and probably has no real idea of how he does it to a point where it is teachable), that doesn't mean that the Lean Startup/Steve Blank's ideas etc have less of a value for the rest of us.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” It gave me a sense of purpose for the rest of the war.

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Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Venture Capital 267

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2009

Ironically, meetings like this had given data and experimentation a bad name inside this company. The team rarely received any feedback about whether the features they were building actually mattered to customers. Ironically, meetings like this had given data and experimentation a bad name inside this company. What a waste.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Continuous Deployment 133

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. Figuring this out takes time, and few entrepreneurs have the patience to wait it out, because the business plan does such a good job of explaining what customers are going to think. The problem is that customers dont read your business plan. The rest can believe what they want.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched. This was about the time Christies and Sotheby’s were starting to auction Soviet space program artifacts , and I was thinking that perhaps a spacesuit in the lobby would be appropriate given our name.

Silicon Valley 137

Silicon Valley San Francisco RSS Vertical 137

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Foot traffic is heaviest in certain areas of a typical trade show floor. Try to avoid dead-end aisles, loading docks, obstructing columns, or other low-traffic regions. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

At the end of a run I used to lay out and relax on the rocks to rest – at least I did, until the guards asked if I knew that there were more poisonous things per square foot here than anywhere in the world.) He replied, ‘They were found in the ‘name of system I should have absolutely no knowledge or access to’ manuals.

Silicon Valley 278

Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 278

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

You should know that there are thousands of entrepreneurs who read this blog, some of whom are working on new platforms that will see the light of day someday. By participating, you've helped the next generation of entrepreneurs avoid the mistakes we made at IMVU. Thank you so much. So I thank you for that as well. Clifford Hicks?

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

For entrepreneurs out there who are building metrics-driven products but also committed to a great user experience, I would love to hear when and how you pay down the product design debt. they even have a name for it , after having done some real-world experiments + it's context in software. what a coincidence. It´s strategic.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Welcome back to Smart Bear Live … the show were Jason speaks with entrepreneurs looking to improve their businesses. Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Unless that person is … you?

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He was a life-long entrepreneur and the first business he created out of college (actually, he founded it while he was at Caltech) was a company that manufactured high quality audio speakers. He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards.

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Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. However, the mistake would be to confuse the interest in consumer facing companies with mass interest in the rest of corporate America. In an existing or resegmented market, this may include branding and product line extensions. It may happen, but its not there yet. (As

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Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 145

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

If you’re an Entrepreneur, you can do it from any place in the world. Outsourcing is something a big company, with a known customer / problem (that has revenue & traction) does to save cost. How important is education when I know I want to be an entrepreneur? If you’re a young entrepreneur, than congrats!

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 9, 2009 10 years of entrepreneurship I recently passed my ten-year anniversary of becoming an entrepreneur. All the good domain names were taken, all the good ideas were being implemented. BusinessWeek named me one of the top young entrepreneurs in tech , based on my work at IMVU.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

Investors are looking for proven entrepreneurs to enter this emerging market and they will get well funded too. What we do on a daily basis is a thousand times more secret than your "stealth" startup and we can still talk about it in more general terms than most "stealth" entrepreneurs talk about their project. This is utter bullshit.

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 31, 2009

lets you post a description of a job without having to reveal the name of the company who is offering it, or the contact information of the hiring manager. The broadcast nature of joblink doesn't seem necessary/useful to me but I can see how the rest are useful. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

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San Francisco Lean Startup Continuous Deployment 68

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea. Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life? 5 Comments 30 Answers Tristan Kromer , I help entrepreneurs find co-founders. "Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?"

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Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42